Wonderful New Resource

I found a wonderful new resource yesterday. I get an email around every other day with links to free homeschool resources (apps, books, printables, etc). There is a religious aspect to some of the free resources if that is what you are interested in, but there is also quite a bit that can be used without including the religious aspect. You can follow this link to Compass Classroom and then click on Fun & Free. You'll find free lessons on social justice, literature, economics, Latin, and more.

I'm really excited to have found this new resource and to be able to share it! I've added it to the resources page also so it will be easily found in the future if need be!

Happy Homeschooling!! :)

Getting Our Curriculum Ready!

Whoa!! The summer is ironically one of the busiest times for me...I'm busy preparing the curriculum for the upcoming year. Definitely check the resources page often over the next days and weeks...I will be adding pages often since this is when I'm accessing them most!

Getting the curriculum and work for the year ready is super exciting but it is tedious work. I love finding new resources and especially preparing the lessons! It's even more exciting in high school because of the interesting electives. This year he has chosen Video Game Theory, Creating Video Games, Notable People, History of Christianity, and Special Victims Law. (If anyone is interested, Video Game Theory and Analysis and Creating Video Games are free online full courses at MIT) I am still looking for resources for Special Victims Law, so if anyone knows of any good resources please leave a comment or inbox me with the info!!

Summer is Boring....

Hayden is having a ball this summer...he's been away for a week and has hardly been in the house at all! I'm bored to tears though! I'm working on getting the curriculum ready for this coming session and sneakily tricking him into learning...LOL!

This Week Has Been Hard...

This week has been really hard. We've been getting things done, but not as much as normal. There is something you don't know about me...something I suppose I should share.

For the past eight years, I have been suffering from a couple of pain disorders. I was initially diagnosed with fibromyalgia, nerve impingement, and slight scoliosis. After more testing it was discovered that I also have rheumatoid arthritis. More recently, MRIs have shown that I have disc degeneration, bulging disks and pinched nerves.

Some days are better than others, but these days I don't have any really good days. I'm not even sure I remember what I feels like to not be in pain. Some days are really horrible and it seems I've gotten stuck with a few of those horrible days in a row.

Because I've been so miserable, I've been sleeping most of the day. When I am awake, I'm propped up in my adjustable bed trying not to focus on pain. My bedroom has been our classroom this week!

Anyway, I will hopefully be back to my version of normal soon and start posting more often again!

Last Week...Otherwise Known As The Week After Spring Break...OR...Improvements To The Folder System!

Last week did NOT go well. After being off for Spring Break, Hayden made every attempt to get out of his school work. In the end, he declared that he doesn't like the folder system as is and that he wanted to make some changes.

The original folder system was that I'd give him a folder full of his work for the week each Monday. Everything had to be finished by Friday but if he finished sooner, he would have days off. However, he could not save all of his work until the last minute. He had to be working on it each day until it was all complete.

The changes that he wanted are actually really great and really responsible changes. He still wants the weekly folder, but he wants to work on things together like we did before. He still looks over the entire folder and decides how much and what he wants to do each day, but we work on everything together. For example, this week, his civics lesson is about propaganda. We read the packet together, taking turns reading paragraphs, then watched the video clips and looked at the pictures together while he read the questions aloud and asked any questions before answering them.

It's wonderful that he wanted to do this. With executive function and ADHD, he tends to have trouble staying on task and is easily distracted when he works on his own. He also rushes through sometimes and makes careless mistakes. Then we end up spending a bunch of time going over things to make corrections. Now he is staying on task and getting more done in a shorter period of time!!

I'm really glad that he made the request for the change so that I didn't have to. This way he made the decision and he's not left feeling like he did something wrong and had to be reigned in. It also shows him that admitting to needing help to succeed with something DOES NOT mean that you have failed!!

Spring Break!!

It is Spring Break here for my daughter, niece and nephew. So...it's Spring Break for my son too! I am going to slip some education in this week though. The "pink moon" or "blood moon" is at about 2am tonight (tomorrow, I guess since it's after midnight!) and we are going to look at it and take some pictures. I'll teach Hayden about the lunar eclipse and why it turns the moon red, etc. I'm so sneaky with teaching!! LOL

Weekly Folder

We have started trying a little something new for us. It gives my son a bit more accountability and it gives me a little bit of free time!

On Sundays, I prepare all of his work for the week as well as a list of his assignments. On Monday morning, I give him his folder and it all has to be done by Friday. If he does it all on Monday, then he can relax for the rest of the week! (That has not happened yet!) The deal is, though, that he can't do nothing all week and try to scramble on Friday. He has to work on his folder each day until it is all finished.

This is only the third week of doing this and I'm not sure yet how well it is going to work. The first week went well, the second week didn't go so well and this week is going really well so far (and it's only Monday!!), so the results are not quite clear just yet.

One clear benefit so far is that he is really getting into writing! We are doing a section on novel writing. Everything is broken down into parts (ie. character development, setting, etc). I got the idea from the site One Year Adventure Novel and I've taken the free sample pages from there and another site (I'll have to find that one again). He is also enrolled in a free online class from Future Learn called Start Writing Fiction that will begin on April 28.

We shall see how this system works as the weeks go on!!

Open Office

Does everyone know about Open Office? I had heard of it before, but just assumed that it couldn't be nearly as good as Microsoft Office since it is free. I was wrong! I recently downloaded it for the gradebook/transcript program I use. It has all of the same programs as Microsoft, but it's FREE!! I know that you can open Microsoft Office documents with Open Office, but I don't know if the reverse is true. If it doesn't work that way, you could easily convert to pdf if you needed to send a document. The small amount of extra work that it might require is definitely worth the money you will be saving!!

Resources

I realize that I've only been adding resources as I blog about them...that's no good for someone who needs resources NOW!! I'm going to take some time this Sunday to fill up the resources list. As I find more, I'll add more. If you have any questions about any of them, feel free to message me!

One In Homeschool, One In Traditional School

Does anyone else have one or some children that also go to traditional school? My daughter does and she thrives there. The problem I'm having is that she is a Junior, which is right on track for her, and my son is a Sophomore, which is two years ahead for him. It frustrates her, and she is always saying that she doesn't think he is "really" in 10th grade because he hasn't taken some class that she feels he should have to be a Sophomore. When I try to explain that homeschool requirements are a little different and that the same school board that oversees her public school education also oversees his homeschool education, she just gets more frustrated. Any ideas on what I can do to help her understand better?

Printable Maths Worksheets

It's fairly easy to find free resources for maths. Over the years, I've used a few different ones (I'll see if I can find the links and list them on the resourses page) but the one I'm using now is Kuta Software. It's specifically made for teachers. From Pre-Algebra to Calculus, you can find worksheets for all at Kuta Software. The worksheets are free, which I love, but they also offer a for fee service that starts with a free trial. I haven't used the service that costs, so I can't really speak to that, but the worksheets are great. My son loves them because they are straight to the point.

Have You Tried CrashCourse?

Let's face it, textbooks and printables get boring. Some kids will say that all learning is boring!!

I've found some wonderful resources on youtube (if you haven't yet, you should take a minute to look around) that my son loves. One of the best is called CrashCourse. They are animated videos that provide a "crash course" on different subjects. There is Psychology, Biology, US History, World History, and more! They were done by author John Green and are really entertaining as well as educational (entertaining is ALWAYS a plus!!). Click here to check it out!

Community Service

In Maryland, all high school students are required to have a certain amount of community service hours to graduate. I think it might be 80, I'm not completely sure, my daughter has 360 and my son has over 100. Regardless of whether or not it is required for your student, it is a great thing to learn the amazing benefits for the community and the giver's soul when you give your time to others.

We've done some really fun things like volunteering at a therapeutic horse farm and coaching cheer for the optimist's club and we've also done some really meaningful things (not that the fun things aren't meaningful, too!) like feeding the homeless and cleaning up the playground.

This is a great link to a list of some ways to get started in your community!! It's on Scholastic's site, so you know it has to be good!! Get started!

Transcripts

So, it has come to my attention that my son will need an amazing high school transcript if he wants to go to a good college. I found a wonderful gradebook program that puts everything into a transcript form that works great for yearly reviews and will be great for college applications. It was free, which makes it all the better!! It's called Gradebook + and I found it on FiveJs.com , a site with a ton of free homeschool resources. These are the features as listed on the site:

• Summary Overview: lists credits and current grades in all courses as well as overall grade (according to weight and credits); includes customizable grading scale
• Attendance Record: not year-specific, so it does not have to be altered from year to year
• Course Sheets: up to 12 courses; includes space for up to five different types of grades (daily, quizzes, tests, etc.); includes an area to record a course description and a listing of all curriculum/resources used in each course
• Reading Book List: printable record of all books read throughout the year
• Extra-Curricular Activities Record: printable record of all extra activities
• Field Trip List: printable record of all field trips
• Grade Report: automatically generated final report card, formatted for printing
• Course List: lists all courses, course descriptions, and curriculum/resources used; automatically generated from the Course sheets
• Detailed directions about how to use the spreadsheet template

Advertisements Disguised As Free Resources?

**Disclaimer: This post is whining and complaining!**

Every so often...more often than I'd like, really...I visit websites for resources that I've already decided against because they cost A LOT or they are uber religious. Today was one of those times.

I went to a site called The Institute For Excellence In Writing, iew.com if you want to check it out. I was excited to check it out because we are working on story writing. The section for free items is called "Freebies & Promos", which I thought possibly meant that it included promotional items (free for a limited time in the hopes that you will make a purchase). However, it seemed to be a section for people to promote their cost based items. I didn't see a free item during the quick scan of the list.

It's very frustrating to me that those items would be grouped together. It's as if people who can't afford to spend a ton of money on materials should have to weed through advertisements. Maybe the hope is that people will click the link hoping for free materials, see the advertisements and buy them. Either way, I think the title should be changed to just Promos...if you aren't going to list free resources, don't call it that.

In the beginning...

When I first started homeschooling my son, I found that the majority of materials that were produced by a google search were highly religious and/or highly expensive. I am not religious and I do not have a lot of money.  With some more time, I was able to locate FREE and secular resources.

Now that my son is in high school, the search for free and secular resources has gotten difficult again. High school materials for homeschooling aren't easy to come by! Some people say it's because many homeschool parents send their kids to traditional school for high school. Because of my son's executive function and ADHD, that just doesn't work for us. Luckily, after years of practice, I'm relatively well versed in searching and trying new things to find what works best for us. (I've found that what works best for us changes over time, as my son gets older or his interests change.)

For those reasons, I've decided to keep this blog to help anyone who wants to homeschool find FREE and secular resources. I'm also going to write about what we are doing and how that works for us so that it might help or inspire you with things in your own homeschooling curriculum!


Definitely leave links in comments if you know of resources or tips to share!!